Today's business environment is extremely competitive. To retain an edge, many businesses have turned to market research to discover what consumers watch and buy. However, this market research can be very time consuming for a business to generate. As a result, the market research is often purchased from market research companies which specialize in collecting purchasing data from retailers and aggregating the purchasing data. A business purchases the aggregated data and analyzes the data to provide insight on what customers want. The business can then make adjustments based on the insight to drive profitable growth.
Data collected by market research companies can be stored in a digital format and the analysis performed on the digital data by market research companies is always changing. As a result, market research companies often create new fields or data types to store or describe the aggregated data. For example, a toothpaste product can have a new field generated due to data collected from recent surveys. Frequently, a business is unaware of these changes and as a result, the market research available is not being fully utilized.